


always finds the sea

by endquestionmark



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 14:44:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9128314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: There it was, that damnable helpless smile again. It grew in her chest like the heart of a star, and threatened to shine through whenever she moved or spoke. When she tried for anger, Jyn found it woven through with gold; when she tried for indifference, it hung just out of reach. When she looked at Cassian, Jyn found it hardest of all to hide the way she wanted to reach out, to see if her fingers would leave glowing trails against his skin or if they would strike sparks.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you just have to commit to the Klimt. (Or the Papyrus of Ani [by way of Tsagaris](http://panostsagaris.com/post/35259038550), if that's more to your taste.)

With the vault door sealed behind them, the air in the control room was perfectly still, without a single speck of dust to scratch the glass of the viewport or a trace of the sand Jyn and Cassian had tracked down previous hallways, all whisked away by the static of the screening tunnel. Outside, the muted hum of blaster shots punctuated the silence, and as the tension stretched out between them for one breath after another, Jyn wondered if she would die here, sealed away from the sun and the wind, the open sky that had meant freedom to her from the moment that she first climbed out of the cave and into a world where the only safe choice was to be nobody.

Cassian was uneasy in a way that Jyn had never seen him. He rocked back and forth, a movement of very few degrees but nevertheless one that made the stiff leather of his stolen officer’s boots creak. Outside, more shots, and then silence. He opened his mouth — to ask K-2SO for an update, no doubt, or attempt contact with Bodhi again — and in the half-second before he spoke, Jyn said: “It doesn’t suit you.”

He looked at her as if she had pulled the floor out from under him, closed his mouth and opened it again. “What?”

“The uniform,” Jyn said, and nodded at the gloves he had discarded on the main console, the officer’s cap pushed down on his too-long hair. “You’d make a terrible officer.”

“If I had to, I wouldn’t,” Cassian said, but he stopped rocking and kept his eyes on her.

Jyn gave him a half-smile: not the one that was new to her, that she couldn’t help, that still felt stolen, but one that came a little more naturally; it said _you’re wrong and we both know it._ “Then I’m glad that you don’t have to.”

He crossed his arms. “You don’t think I could.”

“I don’t think I would want to see it,” she said, and there it was, that damnable helpless smile again. It grew in her chest like the heart of a star, and threatened to shine through whenever she moved or spoke. When she tried for anger, Jyn found it woven through with gold; when she tried for indifference, it hung just out of reach. When she looked at Cassian, Jyn found it hardest of all to hide the way she wanted to reach out, to see if her fingers would leave glowing trails against his skin or if they would strike sparks.

“If we had to,” he began, and Jyn felt something flare inside her chest, like the opposite of defiance;it had all the same fervency and made her feel just as impetuous, but instead of consuming her it made her feel overfull.

“That doesn’t suit you,” she said. “The cap.”

Cassian looked at her for a moment with those eyes of his, that deep-water gaze. Jyn wanted to get closer and see if she could make out the currents of his thoughts, anything but her own reflection and the direction of his attention, but before she could he blinked and said: “All right.” He took off the cap and set it beside the gloves, and that made Jyn want to run her fingers through his hair, mess it back into its usual unruly feathers, but equally she wanted to see how long she could keep flying if she didn’t look down, how long she could stay aloft. “Anything else?”

“You look better in rebel uniform,” Jyn said, and without hesitating he shrugged off the uniform jacket.

“I look like nobody in rebel uniform,” he said, but looked more sure of himself in shirtsleeves than he had while wearing the best armor the Empire could provide.

Jyn shrugged. “Doesn’t seem contradictory.”

“And what do I look like now?” Cassian opened his arms. “A fool.”

“You look like yourself,” Jyn said, and swallowed hard, throat suddenly too tight. There it was again, a tide of light rising through her lungs to spill over at the back of her mouth.

Cassian jerked his chin upwards. “Doesn’t seem contradictory.”

And Jyn — blinking away stars at the realization, looking for the first time into a world where she had nothing to lose, and so could have anything she wanted — said: “You look like home.”

It was suddenly the only true thing she could think of, unbelievably plain in the still air between them and unadorned by any purpose other than its saying; none of it mattered, now. The only way out was up, and Jyn knew that she had used up one chance after another: the first to get them here to begin with, and another for every step she had taken after that, and with the data vault so close — like the exposed spine of some great slumbering beast — she felt like a child again, listening to the rain far above and shaking the guttering lamp for just one more second of light. What she would have given for a handful of sparksticks, to strike one after another as they guttered in the cold draft from above. It would have been a waste, then, with no idea how long she would have to wait.

Locked in with Cassian, waiting for a signal from K-2SO or the final blinding pain of a blaster bolt, Jyn wanted to waste all her final chances except the one she would need to make any of it mean anything, and now she had and they hung burning between her and Cassian like phosphorus in the open air.

“Jyn,” he said, hands open by his sides, and he drew nearer as if pulled by the same gravity that had caught Jyn in the shuttle as he brushed past, turning her to face him. As if they shared a focus now, a binary system out beyond the range of even the strongest signal, spinning alone into the dark.

She didn’t know him, not really; Jyn couldn’t say whether Cassian looked like a killer or a liar or anyone but himself, and it seemed unlikely that she would ever have time to find out. She knew that he had a trick of making himself look smaller, though, with his layers of uniform and disguise and the way he folded in on himself — shoulders slumped, arms crossed — when left to his own devices. It was one thing to know that and another to feel her way around it, face turned up to his, as his mouth caught against hers for barely a second.

They stood like that — Cassian with his eyes closed, when Jyn looked; she kept hers open, and wrapped her fist in the collar of his shirt to hold him still — sharing breath for an agonizing minute, unbearably close and yet so still, and it was only when Jyn pulled him down that Cassian made a sound. It was hardly anything more than a sigh, but from him it was intoxicating, and Jyn bit at his mouth to see if she could get him to do it again.

He did then, and repeated it when she pulled him away from the console, shoved him back against the wall and pressed her leg between his. Jyn felt ungainly and new all over again, and when she slid a hand into his hair Cassian let his mouth open so that the next time she kissed him, it was slow and messy and voluptuous, the sort of casual indulgence Jyn might have dismissed as laziness from anybody else. Because it was Cassian, it felt instead like the sort of revelation Jyn wanted to keep for herself forever: the way he followed when she leaned back, and the way he looked up through half-lidded eyes, and most of all the small shocked sound he made when she got his trousers open.

She swallowed half of what he said, in syllables gasped into her mouth and against her jaw when his knees began to give out. The rest he vouchsafed to her like secrets, one at a time: the way he turned his head into her shoulder, and pressed his mouth to her throat; how messy he got, cock slipping against her palm and getting her fingers slippery, and the obscene sound of it; the way he kept his palms pressed flat to the wall, and only moved his hands when he began to get really desperate, voice breaking on her name.

Cassian clutched at her shoulder when he came, his other hand clenched into a fist; Jyn could see his bloodless knuckles, the faint lines of old scars across them, and she wiped her hand on her own jacket and shrugged it off, letting it slip to the floor. He turned on her then, hand slipping from her shoulder to her elbow and then to her hip, and Jyn couldn’t say if he had the hands of a killer either, but he had the dexterity of a thief and the deftness of a spy.

He undid her trousers one-handed, despite the unfamiliar catches of the stolen uniform, and made up for his awkwardness with his singleminded focus. Jyn could have finished the job herself in half the time, but that wasn’t the point; that wasn’t what she wanted. Cassian was: his gaze and the slight furrow of his brow and the quirk in his mouth whenever he got a particularly good response out of her, the fact that he didn’t have time to learn enough and her indulgence of it, and finally the look on his face when she grabbed him by the wrist, tangled her fingers with his, and the way he stared when she got him where she wanted, killer’s hands or not.

His fingers curled inside of her, most likely on reflex judging by the way that his face was wiped blank with something a little like surprise and a great deal more like contentedness, and Jyn shook her hair out of her face and shoved against the heel of his hand, keeping a tight grip on his wrist. Cassian held obediently still and let her pull him closer, although the angle of his wrist must have been hurting, and when Jyn came — mouth pressed into his shoulder to muffle her cries, boots skidding against the floor — there was no space left between them.

They stayed like that for a moment, pressed together in the close stillness of their mutual gravity, and then Jyn straightened. As if on reflex, Cassian stepped away, brought his hand to his mouth as if unaware of what he was doing and pressed his still-wet fingers to his lips. Jyn watched him, breathless, as she set herself back in order, and that was something else: the curl of his tongue, the way he looked with his fingers in his mouth and her taste on his tongue, almost curious.

There was something of the same lightness to Cassian, too, now that Jyn looked for it. Around the edges, perhaps, or caught deep behind his eyes: she could see it if she just tried hard enough, too new to be an afterimage or a reflection of her own; where she had only seen armor before, armor and burden, she could see it shining through.

The spine of the world bared to them, and a thousand Empire blasters outside; the sky above sealed off by a deflector shield, and the vault in which they stood sealed off by servos; and one last chance tucked between her ribs, next to her heart, next to the burnt-out stubs of all the others she had used to get this far. Jyn thought that, given the choice, she would do it again.

There was still a chance that they might live, of course. She might see the sky again, blink in the sunlight; she might be able to feel solid ground underfoot and listen to the waves as she once had on the black sand beaches of Lah’mu, as the wind sighed through the long grass and the clouds grew heavy with rain. She might even have Cassian by her side.

Still flying, still free; Jyn looked at Cassian, buoyed up by the same new overwhelming lightness, and thought she might finally have a word for it.


End file.
